The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) just released two major regulations on interoperability and information blocking that will shape the health technology sector for years to come. The rules will have also have a major impact on data privacy policy, the future of value-based care, and regulation of health technology.

Join experts from industry and the administration to learn more on specific provisions of the final regulations, as well as the potential impacts on patients, providers, technology developers, and payers.

Presentation Slides and a link to the PwC report can be found at the bottom of this page.

Speakers:

Leigh C. Burchell - 

Health Technology Policy Expert, Allscripts

Leigh directs the Government Affairs function for Allscripts, including legislative advocacy and regulatory interpretation and comment. Her role includes advocating for the company’s 180,000 physician clients, 1,500 hospitals and 13,000 post-acute agencies to ensure that new legislation and administrative policies are supportive of the most efficient and scalable paths towards improvements in the healthcare industry. She has been with Allscripts for more than fourteen years.

Lisa Gallagher -

Managing Director, PwC 

Lisa is currently Managing Director in PwC’s Healthcare Industries Advisory Cybersecurity and Privacy practice. She is responsible for business development, client relations and overall project delivery in the PwC US Privacy, Security and Forensics practice, with a focus on healthcare providers and financial services companies. Ms. Gallagher has over 30 years of professional experience in systems engineering, hardware design, and software development, as well as healthcare privacy, security, and public policy. Ms. Gallagher has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, has been a certified trust technology evaluator (NSA), and is a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) (ISACA). She is also a Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CPHIMS).  

Alice Leiter - 

Vice President and Senior Counsel, eHealth Initiative

Alice is a health regulatory lawyer with a specialty in health information privacy law and policy. She previously worked as a Senior Associate at the law firm Hogan Lovells, where she worked with clients on Medicare and Medicaid pricing and reimbursement. Alice spent several years as policy counsel at two different non-profit organizations, the National Partnership for Women & Families and the Center for Democracy & Technology. She currently sits on the DC HIE Policy Board, as well as the boards of Beauvoir School, Educare DC, and DC Greens, the latter of which she chairs. She received her B.A. in human biology from Stanford University and her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center. Alice and her husband, Michael, live in Washington, D.C. with their four children.​

Danielle Lloyd - 

Senior Vice President, AHIP

Danielle Lloyd is the senior vice president of private market innovations and quality initiatives for Clinical Affairs, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) in Washington, DC. Danielle is responsible for assessing insurance market trends and developing policy in the areas of emerging payment models, quality measurement and health information technology interoperability. She is from Los Angeles, has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and has a master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Colby Tiner - 

Digital Health and Cardiovascular Systems of Care Policy Analyst, AHA

Colby is a Policy Analyst at the American Heart Association, leading the association’s portfolios on health technology, stroke, surveillance, workplace health, and social determinants of health. He also serves as a policy advisor for the Association’s Center for Health Technology and Innovation, a role in which he works with volunteer academics, manufacturers, and providers to develop the Association’s burgeoning policy and research agendas in the digital health space. Colby also represents the AHA in various external digital health coalitions. Prior to joining the association, he ran political campaigns in his home state of Texas and served as an intelligence analyst in the United States Air Force.

Crystal Yednak - 

Senior Manager, PwC

Crystal is a Senior Manager with PwC’s Health Research Institute and leads HRI’s analysis of regulatory and legislative affairs impacting providers and payers. In 20 years as a journalist whose work has appeared in major publications such as the The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business, Yednak reported on health policy and its impact from a variety of perspectives. She followed state government efforts to expand Medicaid, profiled the winners and losers in a shifting provider landscape and chronicled patient experiences in the healthcare system. Prior to joining PwC, Yednak conducted research and wrote thought leadership for a number of companies and nonprofit organizations. Yednak is a graduate of Northwestern University.

This PwC report discusses the regulatory push by CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to shift the way the healthcare system shares data, moving from a system where healthcare organizations may share data under HIPAA to one where they must share data. This has immediate and long-term implications for payers and providers faced with a healthcare infrastructure not built for interoperability. Read more at the link below! 

Automated CT biomarkers for opportunistic prediction of future cardiovascular events and mortality in an asymptomatic screening population: a retrospective cohort study

Body CT scans are frequently done for a wide range of clinical indications, but potentially valuable biometric information typically goes unused. We aimed to compare the prognostic ability of automated CT-based body composition biomarkers derived from previously developed deep-learning and feature-based algorithms with that of clinical parameters (Framingham risk score [FRS] and body-mass index [BMI]) for predicting major cardiovascular events and overall survival in an adult screening cohort.

The full article from The Lancet can be downloaded below.  

CVS Melds Opioid Support Into Social Determinants Network

CVS Health is melding a program designed to help those who’ve suffered an opioid overdose into its widening effort to address social determinants of health.

The effort by CVS Health and its Aetna health insurance unit comes as insurers roll out strategies to move into their communities and beyond the doctor’s office to reduce costs and improve outcomes.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Coronavirus is exposing all of the weaknesses in the US health system

The international response to the novel coronavirus has laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with universal health systems.

There is a real concern that Americans, with a high uninsured rate and high out-of-pocket costs compared to the rest of the world, won’t seek care because of the costs. Before the crisis even began, the United States had fewer doctors and fewer hospital beds per capita than most other developed countries. The rollout of COVID-19 testing has been patchy, reliant on a mix of government and private labs to scale up the capacity to perform the tens of thousands of tests that will be necessary.

“Everyone working in this space would agree that no matter how you measure it, the US is far behind on this,” says Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The full Vox article can be viewed at this link.  

COVID-19 adds new stress to antiquated health record-keeping

The U.S. health care system is on the leading edge of many technologies — except when it comes to passing information between doctors, laboratories, and public health officials. And that could add another snarl to the already troubled effort to test for coronavirus.

Overreliance on faxing, phones and paper records is problem enough in ordinary times. Adding thousands of coronavirus tests a day will test the ability of providers, labs, and public health officials to keep track of all the results. Because not all results are automatically downloaded into physicians' records, the doctors may need to log into laboratory web portals or, if all else fails, turn to faxes and phones to learn test results.

The full Politico article can be viewed at this link.  

Worried About Coronavirus? Now You Can Text Message A Chatbot With Questions

First, wash your hands. Then, pick up the phone. 

Two telemedicine startups are working together on a program that allows worried patients to text their concerns about the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, to a chatbot that can link them to remote doctors. The goal is to help them avoid waiting in crowded clinics that may increase the risk of infection for them and for healthcare providers. 

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Evolving public views on the value of one’s DNA and expectations for genomic database governance: Results from a national survey

We report results from a large survey of public attitudes regarding genomic database governance. Prior surveys focused on the context of academic-sponsored biobanks, framing data provision as altruistic donation; our survey is designed to reflect four growing trends: genomic databases are found across many sectors; they are used for more than academic biomedical research; their value is reflected in corporate transactions; and additional related privacy risks are coming to light. To examine how attitudes may evolve in response to these trends, we provided survey respondents with information from mainstream media coverage of them. We then found only 11.7% of respondents willing to altruistically donate their data, versus 50.6% willing to provide data if financially compensated, and 37.8% unwilling to provide data regardless of compensation. Because providing one’s genomic data is sometimes bundled with receipt of a personalized genomic report, we also asked respondents what price they would be willing to pay for a personalized report. Subtracting that response value from one’s expected compensation for providing data (if any) yields a net expected payment. For the altruistic donors, median net expected payment was -$75 (i.e. they expected to pay $75 for the bundle). For respondents wanting compensation for their data, however, median net expected payment was +$95 (i.e. they expected to receive $95). When asked about different genomic database governance policies, most respondents preferred options that allowed them more control over their data. In particular, they favored policies restricting data sharing or reuse unless permission is specifically granted by the individual. Policy preferences were also relatively consistent regardless of the sector in which the genomic database was located. Together these findings offer a forward-looking window on individual preferences that can be useful for institutions of all types as they develop governance approaches in this area of large-scale data sharing.

The full article can be downloaded below.